Catalogue Number
NMLH.2024.48.7.2
Object Name
stickers
Title
'Danger! Contaminated with apartheid. Boycott South African Goods.'
Place
UK, South Africa
People
Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), African National Congress (ANC)
Events
Apartheid Regime (South Africa)
Description
A sheet of twelve round yellow stickers. Each has a skull and cross bones at the top, and the text 'Danger! contaminated with apartheid. Boycott South African goods'.
These stickers would have been stuck to goods in shops if they had come from South Africa, during the apartheid regime. The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) organised a consumer goods boycott, and labels like this would discourage people from buying South African products. AAM began in 1959 following an appeal by Black South African organisers for international consumer boycotts of goods grown in apartheid South Africa to try and pressure the South African government with economic consequences for apartheid.
The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) was a British organisation involved in the international movement to oppose the South African apartheid system which was introduced in 1948. Under apartheid only white people could rule, and a strict system of segregation privileged white South Africans and kept Black South Africans as second class citizens who were kept poor and with limited access to social resources and employment opportunities, as well as banning interracial marriages. The AAM also co-ordinated the Free Nelson Mandela Campaign with the exiled leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) South African political party. Mandela was freed in 1990, and apartheid ended in 1994 which led to multi-racial general elections that left Mandela as the new president of South Africa.
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